Excluding street walkers - i.e., just escorts, massage therapists, etc.  I would say easily over 1 million.  Am I off - just seems there are som many women - even those who do not advertise who offer themselves to our grubby little hands, etc.

I wonder if anyone - FBI keeps track.

According to the last census, 256,214.

Over a million?? Seems hi. Consider:

290 million people in the US

let's say 150 million women

How many are 18-45? That's a 27 year window and would probably include 95% of workers I'd think, if we figure the average life expectancy is about 80 for women, that would mean about 1/3 are in that range. Let's say 50 million.

Do you really think 2% of that group are escorts? Compared to all the office workers, nurses, teachers, etc. etc.? Would it even be 2% among the highest age bracket (18-25?)

Before anyone starts making hay about how rough my statistics are, understand my background is actuarial science - I KNOW they're from the hip.

My guess would be 1/10th of 1% of the female population - that's still a large number. That would be for ACTIVE girls at any one time, not including ones who have worked in the past.

Let's look at it another way: If there were a 1,000,000 providers and there are 50 states then there would be 20,000 providers in each state and that includes Vermont & Wyoming.  So, I think the number is high by the power of 10

only if you think population is evenly distributed. Fewer people live in all of Wyoming than in Denver. Try looking at a major market like the SF Bay Area. Count all the advertisers on the several boards, scratch the duplicates, and then look at the population of the area. Then figure a percentage.
And because the economy wasn't doing all that well when I left there, a lot of gals seemed to have given up web ads and gone back to the various 'newspapers' like Spectator.
Either the gals that did maintain web ads there either better providers, on average, than those I've so far encountered in FL, or I was just lucky.
I keep hoping the next will be the one that I can write a "9" review on. . .

Thanks for all the info - my estimate was really from the hip - but if half the population is women and like the other poster indicated there are 290 million people in the US then 1/145 = 0.0068965 or 0.7% (seven tenths of one percent) of the female population could be providers by my estimate.

One factor to consider there are many women who "moonlight" as providers while pursuing a more accepted career so being a provider and being in some other line of work are not mutually exclusive.

That is assuming each state has an equal number of people - as we all know there are probably more cows than people in Vermont and Wyoming - so that is an apples to oranges comparison